In many of my letters I have told you of the distress of the people and of peasant risings. In every country of Asia and Europe there have been these revolts of the peasantry, often resulting in much bloodshed and in cruel repression. Their distress drove the peasants to revolutionary action, but usually they had no clear ideas of their goal. Because of this vagueness in thought, this want of an ideology, their efforts often ended in failure. In the French Revolution we find a new thing, at any rate on such a big scale—the union of ideas with the economic urge for revolutionary action. Where there is such a union, there is the real revolution, and a real revolution affects the whole fabric of life and society—political, social, economic and religious. We find this happening in France in the last years of the eighteenth century.
I have told you already of the luxury and incompetence and corruption of the French kings and the grinding poverty of the common people. I have also told you something of the ferment in the minds of the French people; of the new ideas set going by Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu and many others. So there were the two processes— economic distress and the formation of an ideology—going on together and acting and reacting on each other. It takes a long time to build up the ideology of a people, for new ideas have to filter down gradually to them, and few persons are eager to give up their old prejudices and notions. It so happens, often enough, that by the time a new ideology is established and the people have at last succeeded in accepting a new set of ideas, these ideas themselves are somewhat out of date. It is interesting to notice that the ideas of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century were based on the pre-industrial age in Europe; and yet almost at that very time the Industrial Revolution was beginning in England, and this was changing industry and life so much that in reality it was knocking out the bottom from many of the new French theories. The Industrial Revolution really developed later on, and the French philosophers could not of course guess what was going to happen. Yet their ideas, on which to a large extent the French Revolution based its ideology, were partly out of date, with the coming of big industry.
However that might be, it is clear that these ideas and theories of the French philosophers had a very powerful effect on the Revolution. There had previously been many instances of masses in action in risings and revolts; now there was a remarkable instance of conscious masses in action, or rather consciously guided masses in action. Hence the importance of this great revolution in France.
I have told you that Louis XV succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV in 1715 and reigned for fifty-nine years. He is reported to have said: Après moi le déluge,1 and he acted accordingly. Merrily he sent his country to the abyss. He took no lesson from the British Revolution and the beheading of the English King. In 1774 he was succeeded by his grandson, Louis XVI, a very foolish and brainless man. His wife was Marie Antoinette, a sister of the Hapsburg Austrian Emperor. She was also very foolish, but she had a kind of obstinate strength, and Louis XVI was entirely under her thumb. She was even more full of the idea of the “divine right of kings” than Louis, and she hated the common people. Between the two of them, wife and husband, they did everything to make the idea of monarchy hateful to the people. The French people, even after the beginning of the Revolution, were not clear on the question of the monarchy, but Louis and Marie Antoinette by their actions and follies made the republic inevitable. And yet wiser people than they were could have done little. Even so the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia behaved with amazing folly on the eve of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is curious how these people become even more foolish as the crisis deepens, and thus help in their own destruction. There is a famous Latin saying which just fits them—quem deus perdere vult, prius dementat, whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad. There is an almost exact equivalent in Sanskrit—vinash kale viparit buddhi.
One of the props of monarchy and dictatorship has often been military glory. Whenever there is trouble at home, a king or a government clique is attracted towards military adventure abroad to distract people’s minds. But in France the result of the military adventures had been bad. The Seven Years’ War had meant defeat for France, and was thus a blow to the monarchy. Bankruptcy came nearer and nearer. The French participation in the American War of Independence meant more expenditure. Where was all this money to come from? The nobles and priests were privileged and exempt from most taxes, and they had no intention of giving up their privileges. Yet money had to be raised not only to pay debts, but also for the extravagances of the Court. What of the masses, the common people? I shall give you a description of them from Carlyle, an English writer on the French Revolution. He has a peculiar style, as you will notice, but he is often very effective in his pen pictures:
With the working people again, it is not well. Unlucky! For there are from twenty to twenty-five millions of them. Whom, however, we lump together into a kind of dim compendious unity, monstrous but dim, far off, as the canaille; or, more humanely, as ‘the masses.’ Masses indeed; and yet singular to say, if, with an effort of imagination, thou follow them, over broad France, into their clay hovels, into their garrets and hutches, the masses consist all of units. Every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows; stands covered there with his own skin, and if you pinch him he will bleed.
How well the description fits, not only the France of 1789, but the India of 1932! Do not many of us lump together the “masses” of India, the scores of millions of peasants and workers, and think of them as some unhappy, ungainly beast? Beasts of burden they have been for many a long day and still are. We “sympathize” with them and talk patronizingly of doing them good. And yet we hardly think of them as individuals and human beings, not very much unlike us. It is well to remember that in their mud huts they have their separate lives and feel hunger and cold and pain like all of us. Many of our politicians, learned in the law, think and talk of constitutions and the like, forgetting the human beings for whom constitutions and laws are made. Politics for the dwellers of our millions of mud huts and town slums means food for the hungry and clothing and shelter.
So stood France under Louis XVI. Right at the beginning of his reign there were hunger riots. For several years these continued, and then there was a gap, followed later by fresh peasant risings. During one of these food riots at Dijon, the Governor told the starving people: “The grass has sprouted, go to the fields and browse on it!” Vast numbers of people became professional beggars. It was officially declared that in 1777 there were eleven lakhs of beggars in France. How India comes inevitably to our minds when we think of this poverty and misery!
The peasants were not only hungry for food, but were also hungry for land. Under the feudal system the nobles were lords of the land, and to them went a great part of the income from it. The peasants had no clear ideas, no clear goal, but they wanted to own their land and they hated this feudal system which crushed them, they hated the nobles, and the clergy, and (think of India again!) the gabelle or salt tax, which was especially felt by the poor.
Such was the condition of the peasantry, and yet the King and Queen clamoured for money. The government had no money to spend and debts grew. Marie Antoinette was nick-named “Madame Deficit”. There was no way of raising more money. At last, Louis XVI, at his wits’ end, summoned the States-General in May 1789. This body consisted of the representatives of the three classes, or Estates of the realm as they were called: nobles, clergy, commons. In composition it was thus not unlike the British Parliament, with its House of Lords, consisting of nobles and clergy, and the House of Commons. But there were many differences between the two. The British Parliament had been meeting more or less regularly for some hundreds of years and had got well established with traditions and rules and methods of doing work. The States-General seldom met and had no traditions. Both bodies represented the upper classes, the British House of Commons even more so than the Commons in the States-General. The peasantry were nowhere represented.
On May 4, 1789, the States-General wa
s opened by the King at Versailles. But soon the King was sorry that he ever called these representatives of the three Estates together. The third Estate— that is, the Commons or the middle classes—began to take the bit between their teeth and insist that no taxation could be levied without their consent. They had the example of England before them, where the Commons’ House had established this right. The recent American example was also before them. They thought very mistakenly that England was a free country. As a matter of fact this was a delusion, as England was controlled and governed by the aristocratic and landowning classes. Parliament itself was a monopoly of theirs, owing to the very limited franchise—that is, the right to vote.
However, whatever little the Third Estate or the Commons did was too much for King Louis. He had them turned out of the hall. The deputies had no intention of going away. They met immediately on a tennis-court near by, and took an oath not to disperse till they had established a constitution. This is known as the Oath of the Tennis-Court. Then came the critical moment when the King tried force and his own soldiers refused to obey his orders. Always in a revolution the crisis comes when the army, which is the main prop of government, refuses to fire on their brethren in the crowd. Louis was frightened and he gave in, and then, in his usual foolish way, intrigued to get foreign regiments to shoot down his own people. This was too much for the people and, on the memorable 14th of July, 1789, they rose in Paris and captured the old prison of the Bastille and set free the prisoners.
The fall of the Bastille is a great event in history. It began the revolution; it was a signal for popular risings all over the country; it meant the end of the old order in France, of feudalism and grand monarchy and privilege; it was a terrible and terrifying portent for all the kings and emperors of Europe. France, which had set the fashion in grand monarchs, was now setting a new fashion, and Europe was amazed. Some looked at the deed with fear and trembling, but many saw hope in it and the promise of a better day. The 14th of July is still the day of the Fete Nationale of France, and every year it is celebrated all over the country.
The 14th of July saw the Bastille fall to the mob of Paris. Yet, so blind often are those in authority, that on the evening before, on the 13th, there was a royal fete at Versailles. There was dancing and singing, and toasts were drunk, before the King and Queen, to the coming victory over rebellious Paris. It is strange how extraordinary was the hold of the idea of the monarchy in Europe. We, in the present age, have got used to republics and hardly take kings seriously. The few kings that remain in the world behave very circumspectly lest worse befall them. Even so, most people are opposed to the idea of monarchy, as it keeps up class divisions and encourages the spirit of exclusion and snobbery. But this was not so in eighteenth-century Europe. For the people of those days a country without a king was a little difficult to imagine. So it happened that in spite of Louis’s folly and attempted defiance, there was yet no talk of deposing him. For nearly two years more they put up with him and his intrigues, and it was only when he tried to run away and was caught that France decided to do without a king.
But that was to be later. Meanwhile the States-General became the National Assembly, and the King was supposed to have become a constitutional or limited monarch—that is, a king who did what he was told to do by the Assembly. But he hated this and Marie Antoinette hated it still more, and the people of Paris did not love them over-much and suspected them of all manner of intrigues. Versailles, where the King and Queen held Court at the time, was too far from Paris for the people of the capital to keep an eye on them. Tales and rumours of feasting and luxury at Versailles also excited the hungry people of Paris. So the King and Queen were taken to the Tuileries in Paris in one of the strangest of processions. I shall continue the story of the Revolution in my next letter.
101
The French Revolution
October 10, 1932
I find it a little difficult to write to you about the French Revolution. This is not for any lack of material, but because of the very abundance of it. The Revolution was an amazing and an ever-changing drama, full of extraordinary incidents that still fascinate us and horrify and thrill. The politics of princes and statesmen have their home in the closet and the private room, and an air of mystery covers them. A discreet veil hides many sins, and decorous language conceals the conflict of rival ambitions and greed. Even when this conflict leads to war and vast numbers of young people are sent to their death for the sake of this greed and ambition, our ears are not offended by mention of any such lowly motives. We are told, instead, of noble ideals and great causes which demand the last sacrifice.
But a revolution is very different. It has its home in the field and the street and the market-place, and its methods are rough and coarse. The people who make it have not had the advantage of the education of the princes and the statesmen. Their language is not courtly and decorous, hiding a multitude of intrigues and evil designs. There is no mystery about them, no veils to hide the working of their minds; even their bodies have little enough covering. Politics in a revolution cease to be the sport of kings or professional politicians. They deal with realities, and behind them are raw human nature and the empty stomachs of the hungry.
So we see in France, during these fateful five years from 1789 to 1794, the hungry masses in action. It is they who force the hands of timid politicians and make them abolish monarchy and feudalism and the privileges of the Church. It is they who pay homage to the terrible Madame Guillotine and take cruel vengeance against those who had crushed them in the past and those whom they suspect of intriguing against their new-found freedom. It is these ragged, barefooted people who, with improvised arms, rush to defend their Revolution on the battlefield, and drive back the trained armies of a Europe united against them. They achieve wonders, these people of France, but after several years of terrible strain and conflict, the Revolution exhausts its energy and turns on itself and begins to eat up its own children. And then comes the counter-revolution, swallowing up the Revolution, and sending the common people who had dared and suffered so much back to be ruled by the “superior” classes. Out of the counter-revolution emerges Napoleon, dictator and emperor. But neither the counterrevolution nor Napoleon could send back the people to their old places. No one could wipe away the principal conquests of the Revolution; and no one could take away from the French people, and indeed the other peoples of Europe, the passionate memory of the days when the under-dog cast off his yoke, even though for a while only.
There were many parties and groups fighting for mastery in the early days of the Revolution. There were the royalists, indulging in the vain hope of keeping Louis XVI as an absolute king; the moderate liberals wanting a constitution and prepared to keep the King as a limited monarch; the moderate republicans, called the party of the Gironde; and the more extreme republicans, named the Jacobins, because they used to meet in the hall of the Jacobin Convent. These were the main groups, and among them all, and outside them, were many adventurers. Behind all these groups and individuals were the masses of France, and especially of Paris, acting under many an unknown leader from their own ranks. In foreign countries, especially in England, there were the émigrés, the French nobles who had run away from the Revolution and were continually intriguing against it. All the Powers of Europe were ranged against revolutionary France. Parliamentary but aristocratic England, as well as the kings and emperors of the Continent, were equally afraid of this strange eruption of the common man, and tried to crush it.
The royalists and the King intrigued, and only brought their own ruin nearer. The party which was most important at first in the National Assembly was that of the moderate liberals, who wanted a constitution somewhat after the fashion of England and America. Their leader was Mirabeau. For nearly two years they were in power in the Assembly and, flushed with the success of the first days of the Revolution, they made many brave declarations and brought about some important changes. Twenty days after the fall of the Bastille, on
August 4, 1789, there was a dramatic scene in the Assembly. The subject before the Assembly was the abolition of feudal rights and privileges. There was something in the air of France then which went to the heads of the people, and even the feudal lords seem to have been intoxicated for a while by the new wine of freedom. Great nobles and leaders of the Church got up in the Assembly Chamber and vied with each other in giving up their feudal rights and special privileges. It was an honest and generous gesture, though it did not have much effect for some years. Sometimes, but rarely, such generous impulses move a privileged class; or perhaps it may be that a realization comes to it that the end of privilege is near and a virtuous generosity is the best course. Only a few days ago we saw a wonderful gesture of this kind made by the caste Hindus in India when Bapu fasted to remove untouchability and, as if by a magician’s wand, a wave of feeling passed through the land. The chains that Hindus had placed over many of their brethren fell from them in some measure, and a thousand doors, that had been closed to these untouchables for ages, opened out to them.
So in a flush of enthusiasm the National Assembly of revolutionary France abolished, by resolution at least, serfdom and privileges and feudal courts and the exemption of nobles and clergy from taxation, and even titles. It was strange that although the King still remained, the nobility lost their titles.
The Assembly then went on to pass a Declaration of the Rights of Man. The idea for this famous declaration was probably taken from the American Declaration of Independence. But the American declaration is short and simple, the French one long and rather complicated. The Rights of Man were the rights which were supposed to ensure him equality and liberty and happiness. Very brave and daring seemed this Declaration of the Rights of Man at the time, and for nearly 100 years afterwards it was the charter of the liberals and democrats of Europe. And yet today it is out of date and does not solve any of the problems of our time. It took a long time for people to discover that mere equality before the law and the possession of a vote do not ensure real equality or liberty or happiness, and that those in power have other ways of exploiting them still. Political thought has advanced or changed much since the days of the French Revolution, and probably even most of the conservatives today would accept the high-sounding principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But that does not mean, as all of us can find out without much trouble, that they are prepared to grant real equality and freedom. This Declaration, indeed, protected private property. The estates of the big nobles and the Church were confiscated for other reasons relating to feudal rights and special privileges. But the right to own property itself was considered a sacred and inviolable one. As you perhaps know, advanced political thought now considers that private property is an evil and should, as far as possible, be abolished.
Glimpses of World History Page 54
